What's A Dog For?

The Surprising Science Behind Man's Best Friend

It's fairly common knowledge that having a dog around the house can cause a serious uptick in your happiness quota. Just get a dog — all your problems will be solved. But it's not just hearsay. Science says it, too. James Serpell, Director, Center for the Interaction of Animals and Society, went as far as to say that the body's stress reducer, oxytocin, produced by petting our dogs may actually help us live longer. Learn more with this excerpt from What's A Dog For? by New York magazine executive editor John Homans.

The science marched on. One study found that children who are raised with a pet are more empathetic than those who aren’t. The dog—no secret here—is also an excellent wingman. A 2008 study found that a man with a dog has a much better chance of getting a woman’s phone number than without. Dogs can even tell you whether you’re a good person: people who strongly dislike dogs score significantly higher on the measure of anal character and lower on the empathy scale of the California Psychological Inventory, indicated “that people who liked dogs have less difficultly relating to people.” Numerous studies have found that for autistic or emotionally damaged people, dogs can serve as a kind of gateway back into the social world.

Dogs have also long been associated with human damage, with people who are lonely or have trust issues, with misanthropes (Hitler was a dog lover), and with people with lots of money who think—perhaps accurately—that that’s the only reason anyone could love them. Leona Helmsley’s little dog Trouble, the richest dog in the world until his death in 2011, is the obvious example. They only charitable cause specifically mentioned in Helmsley’s will—her fortune was estimated at $5 billion at the low end—was to “provide for the care of dogs.” The document is testament to a moral impoverishment of mythic dimensions—the last bird the queen flipped at the little people. She outsourced the work of distributing the money to her trustees, who have so far not seen fit to bestow much of it on canine causes.

As in Helmsley’s case, a dog can be a last refuge for lost people. Everyone knows people for whom a dog is a chosen escape. A kind of therapeutic solipsism is at work in this type of relationship, needs met and unmet. The dog fits perfectly into this sort of calculus because its needs are so simple—and of course, your dog doesn’t know you’re a narcissist. Loving a dog can be like looking into a mirror that strips away your bad qualities, your human spikes, reflecting only the pure, caring person you believe yourself to be. Relatedly, Nicholas Epley, Adam Waytz, and John T. Cacioppo, psychologists at the University of Chicago, have confirmed what is obvious to anyone observing the dog’s place in the modern world: that loneliness amplifies our propensity for anthropomorphism. In the absence of people to interact with, we transmogrify our dogs into people.

It’s easy to think, looking at canines like Helmsley’s Trouble, that dogs are a species of emotional con men, wheedling their way into the hearts of weak people and extracting their bounty, whether it be a huge fortune or an extra piece of steak and a place in the bed. People get something out of these relationships, it’s true. But dogs look as if they are getting more. John Archer, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Central Lancashire, has gone so far as to suggest that dogs are social parasites. “Pets,” he wrote in a 1997 paper, with the hint of a killjoy’s glee, “can be considered to manipulate the human species. They are similar in this regard to social parasites such as the cuckoo… The affection, food, and time and energy devoted to a pet is not repaid in terms of related offspring and it could have been more profitably spent caring for human offspring and relatives.” Archer judged our relationships with pets as “maladaptive behavior,” and though his argument is about evolution rather than about the day-to-day life with animals, it tended to reinforce the notion that there was something amiss with these increasingly intimate relationships. Stella, he seemed to suggest, was duping me, selling me a bill of goods with those big brown eyes, getting something for nothing.

Excerpted from WHAT'S A DOG FOR? by John Homans. Reprinted by arrangement with The Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA), Inc. Copyright (c) John Homans, 2012.